Rachel may have deserted her villagers, but I know what's really going on in Midori… I am the one who was born through a series of jumbled letters and numbers, programmed to know everything that happens in this horrific nightmare town. Like a virus, the sneaky little ghost raccoon can float through files, codes, and serial numbers, corrupting them beyond normal repair. And I have to stand by and watch helplessly…
For his own gain — and seemingly for the remaining innocent animals, too — he damages us all. Thinking that he is doing them all a favour, one by one, a much-loved neighbour drops off the face of the earth and is never seen again. Those that remain should count themselves lucky they're still alive another week. But it certainly doesn't help that old Rachel was a renowned "time-traveller".
We had all loved Frobert dearly. But funnily enough, he had disappeared a whole year before my player, Rachel, had come across this game, second hand in the video store. She had never been his mayor, but that didn't distract the rest of the town from grieving his loss. With us pretending to be happy, she didn't suspect a thing, despite how false everything and everyone was. Even his little house stood still against time, and not a thing was out of place inside his miniature room. Nothing was touched. And Rachel still had no clue at all…
None of the animals spoke of 4 am, nor did they so much as breathe a word of Frobert, but every single day and night it was the only thing on their minds. Pixel tears may run down their faces, yet to Rachel they were far too tiny to notice amongst the bright and cheery colours of the game. Their howls shortly before 4 am were too quiet for the speakers to pick up… But tonight I had shown her the terrors she did nothing to protect us from!
Every year a selection of villagers are sacrificed to please a sacred deity inside the heart of the ancient animal forest we live in, in order for the peace, happiness, and free lives of the remaining villagers to carry on as normal. All this, in order for aimless pottering and idle chatter to take place… Naturally, Tom Nook is the ringleader of the blood-red festival taking place at 4 am.
Frobert died exactly 347 days ago but his ghost has been in Midori ever since. He would reappear always at 4:42am, always warning us of impending death, always seeming to know who would be next… No matter how many times he would beg the sacrificial animals to leave town, it was too late; Cooper and Booker had closed off all access to the outside world, and Rachel's internet connection had been down since the day her brother died. We had no hope.
Tormiter, as wonderful a mayor as he was, could do nothing for us. Secretly we believed him to be fuzzy in the head, incapable of making any decisions or taking the law into his own hands — and others had made the conspiracy that he was the reason for all the gyroids underground. We knew nothing, and neither did he. But in our hidden meetings at 3am, we all came to the same conclusion — he did nothing to prevent the rituals from occurring.
Although with the intention of tormenting the poor old tortoise, all of the graves were located just outside of his favourite cottage, the one that Rachel lives in presently. Needless to say, he moved away and withdrew into his shell, spending all of his remaining time dozing fitfully behind his desk and behind the protective wing of his helpful pelican. We all believe that Nook planted those graves in that area, thinking that the old tortoise would get the mortgage payed faster in order to leave the house from Hell and move to a place more fitting for an elderly animal, some place less disturbing. Nobody really knows Nook's true intentions…
As the rain pelts down the windows and the wind roars despairingly throughout the decaying trees, one by one, the animals step tentatively from their warm, safe havens. Smiling unfalteringly as their doors chimed cheerfully closed — to them, it may well have been a death rattle, but their dopey expressions would never say otherwise — they stood to dull attention, heads bobbing, paws swinging, hooves tapping and eyes blinking.
After five full minutes of stone-dead silence, the raccoon would slip out of his hiding place and slither to the centre of town, where even the old tortoise mayor was saluting his very presence. He stole his way through the sombrely-lit village easily, as if he had been disguised into a twin of the pitch black night. As if he were born to darkness. In fact, many animals were under the secret impression that Tom Nook was actually a human man wearing the skin of a butchered raccoon, all for his evildoings; and they weren't far from the truth…
Putting a megaphone to his furry, spittle-clotted lips, he bubbled with unintelligible joy as he asked, in his squeaky, garbling, blood-thirsty, hurried voice, for the pre-selected villagers to step forward. These, he had chosen last night, over the champagne and caviar he could afford from the many players he had hounded day after day for mortgages.
Thus, they shuffled closer into the intimate circle formed around the town's camphor tree. They knew what was happening. They knew it from the second the clock struck 3:59 am. But there was nothing anybody could do. Even the ancient mayor was utterly powerless against the will of a sadistic creature!
Marched to the patches of earth indicated by Nook, through the trees, past the museum, and by a small cottage surrounded by an orchard, they were stopped suddenly. A minute of silence passed; a prayer for the damned, a prayer for the lucky, and ultimately, a prayer for the forest god… And when those sixty seconds had passed a whistle was blown and a stop watch button pressed into action.
Shovels were taken out of the three animals' pockets — they knew what to do, for they had seen it a dozen times before now; seen their friends pass in and out of life like useless leaves — and they tore into the earth, digging their own graves. Puffing and panting, the sweat running down their paling faces, the three critters closed their eyes as they plunged into the great gaping holes. Thankfully, one of them was unconscious due to their skull connecting heavily with the hard ground. She didn't have to watch as the pellets of soil came raining down on her broken body… Slowly, slowly… But the other two weren't so lucky. By 4:42 they were all as dead as dodos. Of course, this only occurs at 4am… At no other time could such insanity ensue.
